This study aims to examine how entrepreneurs in early-stage startups develop knowledge – referred to as entrepreneurial knowing – through communicative processes under conditions of uncertainty. It explores how interactions shape belief formation and belief testing and how social capital influences the development of intellectual capital.
Using a qualitative approach, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with early-stage entrepreneurs in the New York City metropolitan area. The data were analyzed to examine how uncertainty is interpreted, negotiated and enacted through communication during entrepreneurial knowing.
Four communicative mechanisms – market hybridity, identity complexity, disciplinary ambiguity and access constraints – shape entrepreneurial knowing in early-stage startups. These mechanisms create epistemic fragmentation, concentrate interpretive authority among founders and filter external feedback. Social capital functions as a communicative infrastructure that both enables and constrains intellectual capital development by shaping access to knowledge, trust and shared interpretation.
This study reconceptualizes intellectual capital as an emergent outcome of entrepreneurial knowing and demonstrates how communication shapes knowledge development under uncertainty. By integrating entrepreneurial knowing, social capital and intellectual capital through a communicative perspective, it advances research on workplace learning in entrepreneurial contexts.
